The coup de grace was near faultless - two special-forces teams working in complete co-ordination stormed the print works where Cherif and Said Kouachi were holed up north of Paris and the Hyper Cacher grocery where Amedy Coulibaly had taken hostages. Within minutes, the three gunmen were dead without further casualties.

"Why is freedom of expression deemed more important than Jewish lives?" asked Melanie Phillips in The Times this week. Her argument was that Western commentators were failing to report the virulent antisemitism at the heart of the Islamist terrorists' campaign of violence.